Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle(2003)

SHORT VERSION:
The Angels find out that ex-Angel Madison Lee is the mastermind behind the theft of the titanium rings, and she intends to sell the Witness Protection Program information on them to several crime syndicates – one of which is the O’Grady Clan, whom Dylan’s ex-boyfriend Seamus is the leader of – on the roof of the Los Angeles Theater during the nearby premiere of Jason’s newest film. Carter, the head of the U.S. Marshal Service, was in cahoots with Madison, but she ends up betraying and killing him after he delivers the rings to her.

The Angels sabotage the sale by tricking the crime families into going onto the roof of the Roosevelt Hotel, where they are surprised by the FBI and put under arrest. However, Seamus and his crew avoid getting collared after Seamus figures out that they are being set up before they reach the roof. The Angels confront Madison on the roof of the Los Angeles Theater, but the O’Grady Clan soon barges in, and a battle breaks out that also sees Anthony/The Thin Man show up and aid the Angels since he had been commissioned to protect Max, whose parents were murdered by Seamus and whom the Angels have placed under the care of Bosley’s mother. Alex winds up defeating the O’Grady Clan, and Dylan fights and kills Seamus, but not before Seamus slays Anthony when he involves himself in their fight. Madison beats Natalie, then detonates some bombs and jumps off the roof, using her dress like a wingsuit to glide to the ground. Thankfully, the Angels avoid death by grabbing hold of some string lights and using them to swing down after her. While gliding past the film premiere, Madison throws another bomb at the crowd, but the Angels warn Bosley – who is in the crowd with his mother and Max – about her approach, so he uses a barrier post to hit the bomb back upward, where it explodes safely. The Angels hop into Madison’s car before she can escape in it and duke it out with her as she drives, and the fight comes to a head in an abandoned theater that Madison crashes into, where the Angels triple-team her until they send her down through the floor, breaking a gas pipe in the process. Madison desperately fires a shot from her gun at them as she falls, igniting the gas and blowing herself up, but the Angels stay clear of the blast. They then recover the titanium rings, which Madison had dropped on the floor just before her demise.

The ladies then go to the film premiere and first meet with Bosley, his mother, and Max, and Bosley’s mother announces that she is adopting Max. Alex then tells Jason that she wants to resume their relationship, and Natalie finds out from Pete that the big question he wanted to ask her was if it would be okay for them to get a puppy for their new home. She says “yes”, and he informs her that he has already gotten one. Natalie also assures Dylan that she has no plans to ever leave the team. Bosley reminds Dylan that, since Seamus and his mob are gone, she can now go back to her old life, but she replies that being with him and the girls IS her life.

LONG VERSION:
Natalie (Cameron Diaz), Dylan (Drew Barrymore), and Alex (Lucy Liu) manage to track down Seamus (Justin Theroux) and the O’Grady Clan to their dockyard in San Pedro and are able to steal the titanium rings from them (which were given to Seamus by a mysterious person as a means of luring Dylan to him so he could have a chance to kill her for getting him put in prison). However, Seamus is able to get a moment alone with Dylan before she escapes, where he grimly warns her that she can’t hurt him anymore and he is going to kill her friends before he kills her just so she can hear them scream. The following night, while Natalie and Alex are out tending to personal matters, Dylan decides to leave the Angels in an effort to protect them, having become too shaken by Seamus’ words. She leaves them a box at the office containing all of the stuff that she has borrowed from them, along with a goodbye note.

Natalie, Alex, and Bosley (Bernie Mac) find the items the next morning with Charlie (John Forsythe) listening in over his speaker box, and Charlie soon tells the three of them that he discovered that Seamus had been released from prison; he didn’t break out. As they wonder who could have the power to pull off something like that, Carter (Robert Patrick) – the head of the U.S. Marshal Service – shows up to collect the rings. After he gives them his thanks, he begins to head for the door, and Bosley throws him his car keys before he goes. Carter catches them up high with his left hand, and this stirs Natalie’s and Alex’s suspicions because, when they rescued him back in Mongolia, he said he had a couple of fractured left ribs, so he should not have been able to reach for those keys without exhibiting pain. Carter informs Bosley that these keys aren’t his and tosses them back to him, then continues on his way. Natalie and Alex draw the conclusion that Carter wanted possession of both rings; he already had one and just needed the other, and he faked his own capture in Mongolia at the start of the film so he wouldn’t be considered a suspect. He then needed time for his plan to come to fruition, so he sprung Seamus and turned him loose on Dylan. Charlie tells the Angels that they are on to something, but their evidence thus far is circumstantial; they need concrete proof.

Natalie and Alex go after Carter, with Alex riding on a street luge and Natalie coming up from behind in her car. Alex attaches a tether to Carter’s car and sticks a device under it so Natalie can listen to his phone conversations, and he first calls someone and tells them that his end of their deal is done; he got both rings and the Angels are now off the case. Carter then gets patched through to the O’Grady Clan and a few other international crime syndicates and tells them that the deal is on at 8:00 p.m. just as they discussed, and he instructs them to “follow the stars beyond the galaxy” and “take shore of hope, and stop on a stair”, then “find a man with a map”. After Alex manages to detach from the car and rejoin Natalie, Natalie tells her that Carter is working with a partner and will be selling off the Witness Protection Program list on the rings later tonight, so they need to take care of them, then find Dylan. We then see Dylan down in Mexico, and after she sits down in a bar to get a coffee, she is visited by a vision of former Angel Kelly Garrett (Jaclyn Smith). She tells Kelly why she left the Angels, but Kelly informs her that the Angels are in even more danger without her. She tells Dylan that her past is what makes her who she is, and Charlie chose her for a reason, for each Angel is unique. Before disappearing, she remarks that, sometimes, we search too hard for answers that are right in front of us.

Meanwhile, Natalie and Alex follow Carter to the roof of the Griffith Observatory, where he meets his mystery partner and says that the buyers are set. His partner then suddenly guns him down, and he drops the rings on the ground before his corpse falls off the roof. Natalie and Alex rush up to the scene and are shocked to discover that Madison Lee (Demi Moore), another former Angel whom Natalie idolizes, is the killer and the mastermind behind it all (and who is also the mysterious person who arranged for Seamus’ release). As Madison starts to converse with Natalie and Alex, Dylan suddenly appears behind her and tries to sneak attack her, but Madison easily senses it coming and hits her over to her fellow Angels. The Angels tell Madison that they have already deduced that she was the true culprit, and Madison replies that, since they know everything about her plan, they all must die. She then whips out her two golden handguns, and though the Angels try to jump out of the way, Madison is able to put one bullet into each of them, and the Angels crash lifelessly onto the ground below. Madison then picks up the rings and leaves.

We next see Madison at the Angels’ office and answering the phone when Charlie calls, and she tells Charlie that she has iced the trio. Charlie tells her that hurting the Angels doesn’t prove that she is the best, and remarks that she never could accept that this agency is about teamwork. He soon criticizes her for having gone rogue on a past case and putting her fellow Angels in danger in the process, plus she got herself wounded so badly that they thought they might lose her. Madison tells him that he did lose her because being an Angel was keeping her from fulfilling her destiny. Charlie replies that her destiny has yet to be written, and asks her not to do what she is about to do, saying that taking the lives of innocent people is not the answer. He then tries to appeal to any goodness left within her, but Madison just destroys the speaker box and departs. Meanwhile, the Angels reveal that they are still alive thanks to wearing Kevlar vests under their clothes, having only pretended to be dead just until Madison left the scene. Natalie soon figures out that Madison is going to be selling the list to Seamus’ mob and the other crime families at the Los Angeles Theater tonight at 8:00 p.m., close to where Jason’s (Matt LeBlanc) new film will be premiering (the odd instructions Carter was giving to the buyers meant they had to follow the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame past the Galaxy Theater, then go past Dinah Shore’s and Bob Hope’s stars before stopping at Fred Astaire’s. They then must pick up a map from the person manning the counter outside the Hollywood Guinness Museum, right near Astaire’s star, then finally go to the bar marked on it to drop off their payments before being given the location of where they will collect the list from Madison).

Wearing disguises of the people under Madison’s employ that the crime families are supposed to meet along the way to the meeting place, the Angels trick all of the criminals into going onto the roof of the Roosevelt Hotel, where FBI Senior Director Wixon (Robert Forster) and his men are waiting to arrest them. However, the O’Grady Clan manages to avoid being collared thanks to Seamus figuring out that he and his crew are about to be set up just before they get to the roof. Madison goes up to the roof of the Los Angeles Theater and finds no one waiting for her, but she notices a lone telescope pointing in a certain direction, so she looks into it and sees the crooks being cuffed at the Roosevelt. The Angels then appear behind her, but though they relieve her of her handguns, she reveals that she earlier placed explosives nearby. The O’Grady Clan then comes barging in, and they try to shoot Dylan and Alex as they climb the theater’s sign while Natalie fights Madison one-on-one, and one of Seamus’ men manages to shoot loose the pole holding up the second “E” in “Angeles”, which causes it to land like a bridge across the theater’s rooftop and the next. Moments later, Anthony/The Thin Man (Crispin Glover) shows up and assists Dylan and Alex (having been commissioned to protect Max [Shia LaBeouf] from Seamus, who had killed both of Max’s parents), and he kicks Seamus off the roof when he threatens Dylan’s life, though Seamus gets possession of his cane sword before he falls. Anthony grabs Dylan and kisses her, then removes a hunk of her hair for himself and sniffs it, and she, in turn, does the same to him. Just as Anthony is about to say something to her for the first time, Seamus suddenly reappears and runs him through the heart from behind with the cane sword, and he falls off the roof to the ground. Dylan and Seamus resume their fight, and Dylan soon finds herself hanging off of the “E” with Seamus applying his cigarette lighter to her hands to try to make her lose her grip and fall. However, she uses her left leg to kick one of the E’s lights and send the broken glass up into his face, blinding him and making him stumble and fall straight to the ground, where he lands on Anthony and impales himself on the sword. Dylan hops up onto the “E” as this happens, but she gets off of it before it breaks off its pole and falls and crushes both Seamus and Anthony.

Alex defeats the rest of the O’Grady Clan, but Madison gets the better of Natalie before blowing her bombs and using her dress like a wingsuit to glide to the ground. Thankfully, the Angels avoid death by grabbing hold of some string lights on the roof and swinging down after her. While gliding past the film premiere, Madison throws another bomb towards the crowd, but the Angels alert Bosley – who is in the crowd with his mother (Ja’net DuBois) and Max (who was placed under the care of Bosley’s mother by the Angels) – about her approach, so he picks up a barrier post and uses it like a baseball bat to hit the bomb back upward, where it detonates without harming anyone and the people just write it off as a special effect. Madison reaches her car, but the Angels manage to get on it just as she stomps on the gas, and they fight while the car zigzags through the street. Madison soon uses a big spotlight in the road like a ramp to send the car barrel-rolling into the air, and Dylan and Alex go flying off of it and crash-land in different spots while Natalie and Madison go smashing through an abandoned theater and are both thrown from the wrecked vehicle onto the stage. All are bleeding, battered, and injured, but alive, and Madison gets the better of Natalie and prepares to shoot her in the head. However, Dylan and Alex find them and save Natalie, and then the Angels triple-team Madison until Dylan and Alex nail her with a double kick that sends her crashing through the floor, breaking open a gas pipe in the process. Madison desperately fires a bullet at the Angels, igniting the gas and blowing herself up, but the Angels stay clear of the blast. They then recover the titanium rings, which Madison had dropped on the floor just before her demise.

The Angels then attend the film premiere (having miraculously healed up after that ordeal), where they first meet up with Bosley and his mother and tell the former that they couldn’t have defeated Madison without him, and Bosley’s mother announces that she has adopted Max. Alex then meets up with Jason and tells him that she wants to resume their relationship before kissing him. Natalie meets up with her boyfriend Pete (Luke Wilson), where she finds out that the big question that he wanted to ask her was if it would be okay for them to get a puppy for their new home. She happily says “yes”, and he informs her that he has already gotten one. Natalie also assures Dylan that she has no plans to ever leave the team. Bosley reminds Dylan that, since Seamus and his mob are gone, she can now go back to her old life, but she replies that being with him and the girls IS her life.